#construction grammar

[from-my-linguistics-textbook]

nice try but you can't stop me

[darlingofdots]

LOVING the hot new grammatical construction we are using on the internet that goes "are you a [x] or perhaps some kind of [y]" and "POV: you are a [x] or maybe a [y] of some sort". It always delights me. It's such a whimsical turn of phrase. I love internet grammar

[allthingslinguistic]

3 Links for Second Year Syntax Video Lectures

YouTube videos from Caroline Heycock, Jeffrey Punske and Remi van Trij

Today’s 3 links are for second year syntax, a frequently-requested topic:

1. Generative Syntax with Prof Caroline Heycock

YouTube video series

11 videos ranging from 6 to 30 minutes, in a playlist that works best when watched in order. The class numbers (generally) follow the chapter numbers of the free online textbook Syntax of Natural Language (Santorini & Kroch), including topics on constituency, recursion, constituency tests, the X-bar schema, sentence structure, noun phrases, the DP hypothesis, and Wh- interrogatives. Professionally-filmed videos of Caroline Heycock with animated examples illustrated on screen. Closed captions available.

2. Jeffrey Punske’s Syntax Course - Intro Syntax First Half Review

YouTube video series

A review of first half of Jeffrey Punske’s Intro to Syntax at Southern Illinois University (video lengths 24-43 minutes). Course based primarily on Syntax: A Generative Introduction (3rd Edn. Andrew Carnie. Wiley), and topics so far include Binding Theory, Knowledge of Language, Phrase Structure Grammars, X'-Theory. Close captions appear to be generated by YouTube but function well. Jeffery sits in his office writing examples on a handheld blackboard. Further videos (e.g. theta theory) are actively being posted as the class is currently ongoing and has just moved online.

3. The Fillmore Criteria - Remi van Trijp

YouTube video

This 11 minute video introduces four basic criteria to determine how closely an analysis follows the original tenets of Construction Grammar, or how much constructional thinking has evolved. Has a transcript, it’s hard to see captions on the white background but you can open the transcript by clicking on the ellipsis (...) button. This video has background music and an animated Remi to talk you through the animated examples on screen. Further videos on this channel include a 3-minute Introduction to Constructions (Fillmore), and 13-17 min videos on Beyond the Saussurean Sign and Innovating One's Way out of Lexicalism

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[drlinguo]

Source:

“First ever #CxG meme? 😬 (Courtesy of Martin Hilpert and Susanne Katharina Pemmerl) @RemivanTrijp @adelegoldberg1 @Etyma1010”

[from-my-linguistics-textbook]

Yes, but only if we twist the night away

by Alexander Bergs

[drlinguo]

Series: Dirty Syntax

Oh, really?! A minimalist? How do you look like when you are a Construction Grammarian?

[jointpainturtle]

What do speakers know when they know a language?

Grammar, vocab, morphemes, etc

Constructions

What are constructions?

Acc. to Goldberg (1995) constructions are arbitrary pairings of form and meaning

That are not strictly predictable based on their component parts, but

May be predictable in meaning as ling as they occur with sufficient frequency

Which is great for explaining idiomatic sentences

Vanilla extract

Voting ended onFeb 6, 2023

[metaphornik]

What is the purpose of grammar?

When you ask what is the purpose of grammar, you probably really want to know what is the purpose of morphology. And, in fact, this is one of linguistics' great puzzles (although not one that is often discussed openly). By and large morphology is redundant in all languages. As you say, it does not matter whether you say 'John likes' or 'John like'. In fact there are many dialects of English where 'John like' is just fine. There's certainly no potential for misunderstanding. The vast majority of inflectional morphemes are not necessary to convey the desired meaning. That does not mean that they do not convey meaning that would not be lost without them (e.g. in Czech accusative and locative often differentiate between a directional and locational meaning of a preposition or even the English plural morphemes are pretty useful) but that the meaning is generally sufficiently clear from context or could be easily recovered through some other means. There are various very powerful models that explain the process of the emergence of inflectional morphology but no clear explanation as to why it's there.

So by and large you can do without morphology but can you do without syntax? That depends on what you think syntax is. If you think about it as mostly word order, then you always need some way to order words one after another. And there does not seem to be one natural, logical way to do it. Subject-Verb-Object may seem natural to us but any other ordering seems to be just as fine. But how necessary is it? Not very. Most sentences are fine in pretty much any order. There are some high profile examples where the sentence alone is completely ambiguous (e.g. Parents love children.) but they would generally be rescued by context (e.g. in Czech 'Parents love children' is always ambiguous without context and in English, you're more likely to disambiguate by including 'their' before the object). But even in languages with relatively fixed word orders, there are many contexts (like poetry) when it can all be upended and mixed beyond recognition.

While there are no languages without some sort of word order conventions, surely syntax is not about the order of words, at all! It's all about capturing the underlying relationships between words and giving them some sort of communicative or configurational function. Nouns become subjects to express agentivity, adjectives become attributes, verbs predicates, etc. We need to capture how agents and patients relate to each other, make sure we know what it is that prepositions modify, link anaphors to their referents, etc. And sure enough, all languages do that in one way or another. But they all do it in a profoundly redundant manner. Almost anything that you might think is essential for communication based on your observations of one language will be found missing in another language. All attempts at finding grammatical universals have failed to find anything plausibly invariable. Even the famous 'Universal Grammar' is just a collection of a handful of some general tendencies.

All the answers to the question, have assumed that there is such a thing as grammar. And not just that. They also assume that grammar is the fundamental expression or carrier of the deeper purposes of language. But I'd like to propose that there's in fact no such thing as grammar. Grammar is consequence of its artifacts, the grammar books. I've written a long post about thinking about grammar in different ways.

Construction grammar offers a much better way of thinking about grammar as an inventory of conventional ways of expressing meanings through sounds, words, parts of words, and combinations of words (constructions). And it's relatively easy to explain why we want to have conventional ways of speaking. Everything in human interaction is governed by convention (tacit agreement). In makes the interaction more predictable, easier to teach to new generations, more useful in differentiating in-groups from out-groups, and of course, it also make interaction more efficient. Not having to negotiate your conventions at the start of every interaction is very helpful. Even redundancy makes great sense because you often deal with the transmission of information over noisy channels (e.g. in a noisy place). Of course, over time, conventions tend to pile on top of one another and the efficiency will suffer. But no matter how morphologically or syntactically complex, no language seems to have transcended the equilibrium of efficiency.

Answer to a question to SE.